Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Accurate was my instinct! Decades later, over the seasons of my marriage to Kittredge, I learned the innermost secrets of Harlot’s young manhood even as he had confessed them one by one to her; what other gift could measure his profound love for Kittredge? He had indeed been a prick, and of the worst sort. His personal devil had been a great desire to ream young pits. There was hardly a good-looking boy in his instruction whom he had not wanted to bugger. According to Kittredge, he never had: at least, not if he was telling the truth—which was always the question—but he avowed that until he met her, this impulse was the ongoing daily torment of his years at Harvard, then later at St. Matthew’s where he ground his teeth in sleep. Indeed, he had not entered the ministry for fear that he would, one good day, dive deep into his impulses and betray his church. The sexual energies, in consequence, were in-held. As he took my hand on introduction and stared into my eyes, he was a force and I was a receptacle: He was clean as steel and I was a punk.

  I remember how my father, forty pounds heavier than Hugh Tremont Montague, circled nonetheless around our introduction like an anxious relative, a facet of Cal Hubbard’s personality I had never seen before. I not only realized how much this meeting had to mean to my father, but even why it had taken so long to arrange—Cal Hubbard’s expectations would suffer a dull return if it did not work.

  I describe our meeting as if there were no one else in the house. In fact, something like seventeen of us, Mary Bolland Baird, Rough, Tough, cousins, fathers and mothers of cousins, aunts, uncles, numerous Hubbards were there. It was our last summer in that period at the Keep. My father was in the process of selling the place to Rodman Knowles Gardiner, Kittredge’s father, and we were all taking a long farewell to our summer house. There might have been five people present when we were introduced, or ten, or we could have been alone. All I remember is that my father circled Mr. Montague and me, and my father was soon gone. I have some recollection that we then went down to the den to have a talk. That comes to me with clarity.

  “You’re out of the dyslexia, your father says.”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. What are your subjects at St. Matthew’s?”

  I named them.

  “Your favorite?”

  “English,” I said.

  “What’s the best novel you’ve read this year?”

  “Portrait of a Lady. We had it assigned, but I liked it a lot.”

  He nodded sourly. “Henry James is a quince pie as large as the Mojave Desert. It’s a pity. Put Hemingway’s heart in him and James would have been a writer to equal Stendhal or Tolstoy.”

  “Yessir,” I said. I was such a liar. I had gotten an A for my paper on Portrait of a Lady, but I had merely parroted a few critical appreciations. The Young Lions was what I had enjoyed most last year. Noah Ackerman, the Jew, had appealed to me.

  “Let’s go out tomorrow,” he said. “Your father wants me to take you on a climb. I hear there’s dependable rock suitable for beginners over at a place called Otter Cliffs. We’ll pick a route that’s feasible.”

  “Yessir.” I was hoping that what he called Otter Cliffs was some other Otter Cliffs than the one I knew. That was black rock and dropped a straight eighty feet down to the sea. Sometimes on the rise of the tide, there was a heavy roll of surf in Frenchman’s Bay, and I had heard the growl of black waters on black rock at Otter Cliffs. Indeed, the fall was so steep I could never look over the edge.

  “Guess I haven’t done any rock climbing,” I said, and regretted the remark on the instant.

  “You’ll know a little more tomorrow than you know right now.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Your father asked me to be your godfather.”

  I nodded. My quick fear at the thought of tomorrow had already commandeered the lower register of my voice. If I said “yessir” one more time it would come out like ship’s pipes.

  “I have to tell you,” he said, “I was inclined to refuse.” He fixed me front and center with his stare. “One must have a close personal interest to be a godfather.”

  “That’s true, I suppose.” I croaked it forth.

  “I don’t like close personal interest.”

  I nodded.

  “On the other hand, I have regard for your father. No one will ever know how good his war record was until the secrets can be told.”

  “Yessir.” But I beamed. Absolutely unexpected to myself, I experienced such happiness at this confirmation of my father’s qualities that I knew the value, on the spot, of family pride and could have been filled from head to toe with well-nourished blood.

  “Some day,” he said drily, “you must try to equal him.”

  “Never,” I said. “But I intend to try.”

  “Harry,” he said, giving me back my name for the first time, “you’re fortunate to be carrying that kind of burden. I don’t tell people often, but since you and I are obviously embarked on a special venture, at least personally speaking, I choose to inform you that a father one admires extravagantly may be less of an impost than growing up without one. Mine was killed in Colorado in a shooting accident.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I was eleven when it occurred. I must say I didn’t have to grow up altogether without him. He was always a presence in my life.”

  It took a few more years before I was to learn from Kittredge that David Montague, Harlot’s father, had been shot by Harlot’s mother, Imogene, as David entered the master bedroom one night. It was never clear whether he had lost his keys and was climbing through the window or walking through the door. There was too much blood on the floor. Either he had traveled on his belly, mortally wounded, from the window to the door, as was her claim, or had been dragged by Hugh’s mother from the door to the window, then back to the door, to support the story that his unexpected entrance by the window caused her to believe he was an intruder. I understand Ty Cobb’s father was shot under similar circumstances and there are some who believe it accounts for the tigerish rapacity of Ty Cobb on the base paths. If that is the formula for generating ungodly determination, I see no reason why it could not apply to Harlot.

  Next day, true to his promise, he drove me out to Otter Cliffs. In anticipation, I spent a sleepless night. First I hoped it would rain, then that it would not. I was certain Mr. Montague would say the essence of rock climbing was to accept the given. If the rock was slippery, we would still have a go. So I began to pray it would not rain.

  It was misty at 6:30 in the morning, but I knew the weather on Mount Desert well enough to see that the sky would be clear by eight. To avoid a family breakfast, we had fried eggs and coffee at a hash-house (no granola for outdoorsmen then!) and I ate my food in all somber duty, the yolk and biscuits going down like sulphur and brimstone, after which we took the Park Drive along the eastern shore of Mount Desert. As we drove I named for him places long familiar to me, the Beehive, Sand Beach, Thunder Hole, Gorham Mountain, a guide leading the way to his own terminal hour. Or so I was convinced. Rock climbing was familiar to me, if only in sleep. I always knew when a dream had become a nightmare, for there was I clinging to a wall.

  We parked. We walked along a wooded trail for a hundred yards, and suddenly had, all to ourselves, the precipice of a cliff. Our view was open to the boom and hiss of the Atlantic pounding on rocks below. I took a quick glimpse down. It proved no easier than standing on the edge of a roof seven stories high that had no railing. My impulse was to ask Mr. Montague if this was, for certain, the right place.

  He was scouting, his boots six inches from the lip. He strode along, frowning and clucking, weighing one ascent against another while I sat beside his pile of climbing gear, nerveless, and for all I knew, limbless. The stone on which I perched was pale pink and friendly, but the straight rock-fall below was dark gray, and black at the bottom. Years later, in the Department Store in Saigon, I was to have an outrageous attack of anxiety one night while staring at a Vietnamese prostitute’s outspread legs. Her open
vagina looked as sinister to me as an exotic orchid. Only then did I realize that the contrast of her pink petals and near-black overleaves had brought me back to the fearful minutes I waited for Harlot to take the measure of where to commence my instruction.

  Finally he settled on the right place. “This will do,” he told me, and unstrapped his gear, took out two coiled nylon ropes from the tote bag, and tugged on a few trees near the edge. “We’ll rappel down,” he said. “It’s easy. Beginners like it. I, however, confess to you—it terrifies me.”

  Somehow, that was reassuring. “Why?” I managed to ask.

  “You’re dependent on things external to yourself,” he answered, as if that were the only reply. “There’s no sure means of knowing when a little tree like this gives way.”

  He was taking precautions. I will not try to describe all that he did, but I could see that he anchored one end of the rappel rope not only to the tree, but to an adjacent rock through the agency of a long sling of webbing. These various ties converged through an oval chromium ring smaller than my palm, which I knew was called a carabiner.

  “Are you going to use pitons?” I asked, trying to give a warrant of knowledgeability.

  “Oh, no need,” he said. “Not for this.”

  Old as he was, we were acting as if both of us were seventeen. Which made it worse—he was vastly superior.

  “All right, you wait here,” he said when done, “and I’ll go down, look it over, and come back. Then you’ll do it.”

  I found it hard to believe that he was going to make a voyage up and down that cliff as casually as taking reconnaissance of a few floors on an elevator, but indeed, he gave one mighty yank on the anchor of his rappelling rope, and satisfied with such security, stood on the edge of the cliff, back to the sea, the rope wound once around his waist, and stated, “You’ll find this the hardest part of the rappel. Just slack off some rope and consign your butt to the void. Then, sit back on the rope.” Which he did by placing the sole of his shoes on the lip and leaning backward, until his extended legs were in a horizontal line with the ground. “Now,” he said, “just walk down, step by step. Keep your legs stiff, your feet against the rock, and give yourself slack when you need it.”

  He made a few moves slowly, simulating the step-by-step technique a beginner should employ, the performance going on for five or six steps of descent. After which, bored with the sluggishness of this method, he gave a little whoop, shoved off with his feet from the rock, and slackened ten feet of rope in a rush. When he bounced, toes first, back into the wall, he was a good piece further down already, and with three or four more such springs out from the wall, there he was below, standing on a ledge of flat, black, wet stone.

  He slipped the rope from around his waist, called to me to pull it up. Then he climbed right after. It seemed to take him no longer than he would have spent on five or six flights of stairs.

  “Nice rock,” he said. “You’ll have a good time.”

  I did not say a word. I thought of every excuse I could make. I had had no sleep. My operation left me dizzy at unexpected times. I would like to approach this more slowly: Could we warm up on a trail that did not require ropes? Below, tolling loudly on the rocks, the surf reverberated among my fears.

  I said nothing. My own destruction was by now superior to whimpering out of this situation. Since I could find no excuse to survive, I stood as passively as a martyr before faggots and flames, but I was only a numb body suffering the rope to be fastened about me. Later there would be much sophistication of apparatus, but on this occasion, he merely knotted one end of a mountain cord around my waist and dropped the rest of the coil on the ground beside him. He took another rope, doubled it, and slipped it through the carabiner attached to the tree, after which he passed it through two carabiners linked onto my harness at the waist, these carabiners to serve as brake, he explained, during the rappel. Then he ran this double rope under my thigh, passed it diagonally across my chest, and around my back to the other arm. So holding each end of its snakelike embrace of me, one hand guiding the slack, the other out for balance, I prepared to go off the lip.

  To put one’s heels on a ledge and lean backward into space, holding only to a rope, is equal to the wail one hears in childhood on falling out of bed. One discovers the voice is one’s own. My first few steps, feet pressed flat against the vertical rock, were as clumsy as if my legs were concrete posts.

  It was only after I descended five or six steps that I began to comprehend that the act of rappelling could actually be accomplished; indeed, it was a good deal easier than learning to use crutches.

  How intimate was the surface of the rock, however! Each pock before me was an eye-socket; each large crack, a door ajar. Faces of intricate benignity and malevolence looked back at me from the lines and knobs of the rock. I felt as if I were lowering myself around the flank of Leviathan. Yet such was my relief at being able to perform these acts that before I reached the bottom, I actually gave a few thrusts out with my legs and tried running off slack through the double carabiners at my waist, these tentative efforts not dissimilar, I am certain, to the first stir of the lower throat that a six-week-old dog will make in preparation for barking.

  I reached the ledge. The surf was steaming just below, and the wet, black stone under my sneakers felt as oily as a garage floor. I released the double rappel rope from the double carabiner and only then realized I had been attached all the while by my harness itself to the coil of cord Mr. Montague had held. If all had gone wrong, and I had lost balance on the rappel, Mr. Montague would have been there to support me by the second connection. Now my initial fear felt absurd to me. I was commencing to learn that fear was a ladder whose rungs are surmounted one by one, and at the summit—as Mr. Montague would probably say—lay Judgment itself.

  He now plummeted down in three long swoops to stand beside me on the wet ledge. “This climb will test you,” he said. “However, it’s not unreasonable. Just a matter of learning a new vocabulary.”

  “What do you mean?” I murmured. I now had had my first good look at the ascent, and fear returned.

  He gave the smallest smile—the first he had been ready to offer since his arrival. “You’ll find I picked a climb with a few buckets.”

  Unattached to any rope, he started up. “Try to recall my route when you’re here,” he called down from fifteen feet above, “but don’t fret if you lose it. Part of the fun is to come on your own finds.” Whereupon he mounted the face in one continuous series of easy moves and was at the top before I became aware again that the rope attached to my waist was still very much in place, and its other end was tied to some tree above the lip and out of sight. Mr. Montague appeared on the edge, some eighty agonizing feet above, sitting on the brink in all comfort, his feet dangling over, my rope—the rope, that is, with which he would belay me—wound casually, and only once, around his waist.

  “Won’t I pull you with me if I fall?” I asked. My voice emerged in a reasonably clear little croak, but the effort was analogous to putting the shot.

  “I’m anchored to the tree.” He beamed down on me. “Get started. I’ll send you clues by carrier pigeon.” I was beginning to understand what animated him. The air of funk in others can taste, I suppose, like caviar.

  How to speak of the beauty that rises from one’s fear of the rock? I was shriven. I understood the logic of God: The seed of compassion is to be found in the harsh husk of the demand.

  As I started up the wall, I could not believe how vertical was the ascent. I thought there might be some slant in my favor, but no. Vertical. True, the rock was cracked and scarred and nubbled and pitted, a raw acne of surface that you could certainly get a grip on. Feeling a friendly knob of a hold at the top of my reach, and seeing a small slot for my foot, I stepped in, reached up, and pulled myself one foot off the bottom ledge. I knew something of the emotions of the first great day at Kitty Hawk then. Yes, this was as good as the virgin jump from the balcony deck into Blue Hill Bay
. To fortify me, Mr. Montague pulled slightly on my harness. “If you need a little help,” he yelled down, “call: ‘Tension,’” on which, by demonstration, he pulled harder so that I felt somewhat less than my own full weight and more inclined to climb. I found another grip and foothold just above, took the move, took another, and another, glanced down. I was eight feet above the ledge. Splendid! I found another knob and just above my knee was one of the buckets of which he spoke, a hole about as large as a pool-table pocket in which I could rest my foot. There I halted, catching my breath. The rock felt alive. It had odors, grooves filled with dirt, overhanging elbows, armpits; it had pubic corners. I do not wish to exaggerate, but I was not prepared for the intimacy of the activity. It was as if I were climbing up the body of a giant put together of the bones and flesh and pieces and parts of a thousand humans.

  Now, soon enough, I entered a more difficult portion of the ascent. About halfway up, I came to a place where I did not know how to continue. There were no good grips to reach with my hands, and not a quarter inch of rock-wrinkle to support the next push with my foot. In deadlock, straddled, I encountered the agonizing indecision of the rock climber. All the while that one’s limbs are burning from expenditures of anxiety, one does not know whether to try to continue up or look to descend a few feet in order to veer onto another route. Frozen on the rock, my voice scorched in my throat, the open depths below were falling away into the unrecoverable past. I stared like a pawnbroker at the dubious possibilities presented by each ripple in the rock. I think half of all I ever learned about rock climbing came from these first five minutes on Otter Cliffs; I was given a quick introduction to the great social world of vertical stone. There the smallest bit of irregularity can prove an immensely useful friend, a treacherous if conceivably employable associate, a closed door, or an outright enemy. I had by now managed to maneuver myself into a coffin’s corner just beneath an overhang.